Tikkun Magazine, July/August 2009
ANGELS & DEMONS, Columbia Pictures, 2009
YOO-HOO, MRS. GOLDBERG, International Film Circuit, 2009
Review by David Sterritt
Angels & Demons begins in intriguing places -- the Vatican in Rome and the Large Hadron Collider in France, where CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, analyzes particle-beam collisions in hopes of finding the ultimate building blocks of matter. In the Vatican, the Pope's ring is being cut apart with a hammer and chisel, signaling that the pontiff has died and a new one will soon be selected. At the collider, scientists are trying to create an unprecedented amount of the mysterious stuff called antimatter and thereby discover the so-called God particle, aka the Higgs boson, which (if it exists) would account for why fundamental particles have mass and how the universe we inhabit came to be. The movie promises a dialogue between fact and fiction, materiality and spirituality, physics and metaphysics.
It doesn't deliver on the promise, though. The picture's guiding hands -- director Ron Howard, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, and star Tom Hanks -- have picked up nothing in the way of spiritual depth since their previous adaptation of a Dan Brown novel, The Da Vinci Code, in 2006; nor has the addition of screenwriter David Koepp, who scripted some of Steven Spielberg's more empty-headed fantasies, changed the generally empty-headed approach to faith-based topics. The plot is more streamlined this time around, draining off some of the concept's goofiness without making it a speck more plausible, and the action moves at a steadier pace. But finding an intelligent thought here would stump all the scientists at CERN.
For those tuning in late to the Dan Brown movie saga, let's review. The hero, Harvard University symbologist Robert Langdon, made his debut in The Da Vinci Code when the French police asked him to help with a puzzling case -- the murder of a curator at the Louvre, who left behind enigmatic ciphers that point to a long-buried secret concerning Jesus, his relationship with Mary Magdalene, and the birth of a daughter, Sarah, who carried the holiest of bloodlines into future generations. Determined to decipher the ciphers, even though he's now the number-one suspect in the crime, Langdon hops from clue to clue with a pretty cryptologist at his side and gendarmes hot on his trail. His investigation touches on the Priory of Sion, a conspiratorial cult; the Knights Templar, a medieval monastic order; the Hieros Gamos, a pagan sex ritual; the legend of the Holy Grail; the Fibonacci number sequence; the smile of the Mona Lisa; and plenty more, including a sadomasochistic monk named Silas, who belongs to the Opus Dei sect and wears a flesh-mortifying cilice beneath his clothes.
Angels & Demons was published three years before The Da Vinci Code, which makes it technically a prequel, but there's no connection between the movie versions apart from their churchy themes and Langdon's talent for high-speed sleuthing, which makes Sherlock Holmes look like an American Idol loser. After the opening scenes, the picture kicks into gear when enemies of the Roman Catholic Church steal the antimatter created at CERN, smuggle it into the Vatican, and threaten to use the explosive stuff to blow up the Holy See after executing four kidnapped Cardinals who are favorites in the papal election. All of this will happen over a four-hour period unless the symbologist and his sidekick (a pretty physicist this time) can foil the scheme. Conveniently for our hero, his adversary has an absolute mania for sending out brain-teasing clues, which Langdon interprets with little difficulty, perhaps because they're on the Harvard curriculum. Behind the evildoing is a revived version of the Illuminati, a secret society that used scientific materialism as a weapon against the church a few centuries ago. (That's what the movie claims, although I don't recommend it as a study guide.) The group's members hate the church because it persecuted their predecessors in olden days, using tools like capital punishment and enhanced interrogation techniques. The movie doesn't explain why the Illuminati's scientific views haven't made much progress since the Middle Ages -- they still think the elements are earth, air, fire, and water. No wonder they have to steal antimatter instead of whipping up their own.
That last point sums up what's wrong with pictures like this. In terms of relevance to the actual world, Angels & Demons is stuck in air-earth-fire-water mode as pathetically as its own villains. It's clearly reactionary drivel, and if you read it allegorically -- with the Illuminati standing for al-Qaida, say -- it's even worse, putting the salvation of the world (or Catholicism, actually) into the hands of a secular super-sleuth with a knack for solving puzzles. Brown's unapologetically trashy style indicates that he's less interested in literary art than in making the bestseller lists; sure enough, both Robert Langdon novels have promptly landed there. (A third, The Lost Symbol, is due this fall.) The screen adaptations fall right in line with this, subordinating ideas to eye candy every step of the way.
Angels & Demons exemplifies Hollywood's longstanding policy of exploiting rather than exploring religion, using it as packaging for conventional melodrama, as in Doubt, or superficial "uplift," as in Touched by an Angel, or salacious horror-mongering, as in The Exorcist, or neurotic self-indulgence, as in The Passion of the Christ. When exceptions come along -- the TV version of Angels in America, for instance, or Martin Scorsese's flawed but devout The Last Temptation of Christ -- they're attacked by zealots for not adhering to one party line or another. (For my money, the HBO series Big Love has more to say about religious values in everyday life than any theatrical feature in ages.) Hollywood's most conspicuous religion-based films are, like Brown's novels, designed to give the appearance but never the substance of spiritual engagement; from The Ten Commandments in 1956 to Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 2005, they traffic in fantasy and spectacle, not significance and insight, remaining doggedly oblivious to a real and active spirituality that would mean something outside the multiplex. Angels & Demons falls into the same depressing trap.
As an aspiring summer blockbuster, the picture has been blessed by its producers with a talented cast: Hanks, a smidgen less charming than usual; Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer, smart and appealing as the pretty physicist; Stellan Skarsgård, smoldering away as a police commander out of his depth; and Armin Mueller-Stahl, mugging like mad as the cardinal who runs the electoral conclave. Ewan McGregor gives a richer performance as Patrick McKenna, a priest who gets to run the Vatican until the next pontiff takes over, but he's involved in the film's most egregious display of faux populism. This occurs when McKenna has to decide whether to admit Langdon into the closely guarded Vatican archives. McKenna asks Langdon whether he believes in God, and Langdon tries to evade the question. Pressed on the matter, Langdon says faith is a gift he hasn't received; pressed a bit more, he says he probably isn't going to receive it. McKenna then ushers him into the archives straightaway, as if the honesty of his answer erased his total lack of spiritual inclinations. I call this bogus populism because the moment is an obvious bid to manipulate the audience -- if you're religious, you're invited to feel a step ahead of Langdon, who would surely like to have the gift; and if you're nonreligious, you get a pat on the back, since this earnest young cleric has smiled on Langdon's secular humanism. Not even the revelation of McKenna's own secrets, deep in the movie's last act, undoes this scene's emotional mischief.
All of this said, I'd forgive many faults in Angels & Demons if it said anything intelligent about the God particle, one of the most fascinating subjects in contemporary science. But the subplot about CERN is merely a gimmick. Gimmicks have their uses, of course, and the supremely gifted Alfred Hitchcock was so fond of them that he called them by a special name -- for him a gimmick was a MacGuffin, a story element that matters little to the audience but propels the picture forward by giving the characters something to fuss about, like the stolen money in Psycho or the microfilm in North by Northwest. The antimatter in Angels & Demons is a textbook MacGuffin, carrying no significance whatsoever except for the possibility of blowing up. So why does the story link danger to the God particle instead of, say, nuclear weapons or dirty bombs? You don't need a symbology degree to figure out the answer -- mentioning the particle enhances the impression that this completely Godless film is somehow about God after all. Too uninspired to be angelic and too tepid to be demonic, Angels & Demons winds up in the limbo where stupid movies dwell. It has nothing to offer but riddles to be solved, villains to be chased, mumbo jumbo to be muttered, and God as the MacGuffin of the month.
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
Moviegoers looking for more intelligent fare should keep an eye out for Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, an engaging documentary about writer-director-star Gertrude Berg and her fondly remembered sitcom, The Goldbergs, which began a seventeen-year radio career in 1929 and moved to the television airwaves in 1949, becoming the new medium's first character-driven domestic comedy. The title comes from the cheerful "yoo-hoo" that Molly Goldberg and her neighbors called from their tenement windows when they wanted to chat.
The radio version, originally called The Rise of the Goldbergs, established the tone of gentle comedy and the subject of Jewish-American assimilation that lasted throughout the show's history. The main characters were Molly, her Yiddish-accented husband and uncle, and a good-natured son and daughter. In the early episodes they lived in the Bronx, and after ten years they moved to a town in Connecticut, providing a fresh background for the ethnic humor that remained the staple of the program. Pathos sometimes appeared as well, with occasional episodes speaking about the Holocaust or anti-Semitism in American society.
The Goldbergs had a bad run-in with politics in 1951 when actor Philip Loeb, who played Jake Goldberg, was blacklisted by the industry after his name was circulated on a list of alleged communists; this alienated the CBS network and drove away the program's longtime sponsor, Sanka coffee, which was so much a part of the show that a Sanka can sat permanently on the Goldbergs' windowsill. Berg reluctantly replaced Loeb with one actor and then another, but audiences didn't warm to them and the program seemed somehow diminished. Moving the characters back to the Bronx didn't help, nor did a final season with a suburban setting. After moving to the minor DuMont network and then to syndiccation, The Goldbergs finally petered out in 1956.
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg was produced and directed by Aviva Kempner, whose past work includes The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, a first-rate documentary about baseball's most famous Jewish player. She efficiently recounts the sitcom's history, interspersing film clips and archive materials with reminiscences about the show by such luminaries as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Norman Lear, the TV producer and social activist. These comments add humanity to the film, and people who remember The Goldbergs from bygone times will have a wonderful time revisiting it here. The movie would be stronger, though, if it touched more seriously on Jewish-American identity and other issues.
As I watched the film, I wanted to know what, for example, was Berg's basic conception of Jewish-American identity? Kempner demonstrates Berg's concern about anti-Semitism and Jewish persecution, but was this rooted in a specifically Jewish ethic or in a generalized sense of solidarity that any afflicted minority might feel? Were prayers or seders ever shown, and did the characters ever discuss Jewish beliefs and values? If so, what did non-Jewish audiences make of this? If not, was the show's Jewish-American image just a matter of Yiddishisms and social habits? More broadly, how did Berg modify the program as the Depression gave way to World War II and then to the postwar economic boom? When the working-class Goldbergs moved to the middle-class suburbs, what happened to the windowsill chats that meant so much to the program's atmosphere? Could different creative decisions have kept the show in business beyond the middle 1950s, when working-class sitcoms like The Goldbergs and The Honeymooners and Amos ‘n' Andy were swamped by a swelling tide of middle-class sitcoms like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver?
That's a lot of questions, but I mean them to be matters for further reflection, not grounds for skipping over Kempner's movie. Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg deserves thanks for bringing up so many thought-provoking issues, even if the treatment is less thorough than I'd prefer, and I encourage Kempner to continue probing aspects of mass-media history that are now half forgotten despite the influence they've had on later entertainments. The Goldbergs is a cultural time machine, and ongoing thought about the questions I've raised could reveal a good deal about conceptions of identity in the not-so-distant past.
David Sterritt, Tikkun's film critic, is chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and professor emeritus at Long Island University. He was film critic of The Christian Science Monitor for decades. His latest books are Guiltless Pleasures and The B List.
